


still here

by grangerbutstranger



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Post-Mockingjay, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-05 13:48:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grangerbutstranger/pseuds/grangerbutstranger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: "Katniss/Peeta - the scenes we didn't see at the end of Mockingjay, <i>you and me of the 10,000 wars</i>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	still here

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://kolms.livejournal.com/18020.html?thread=1341028#t1341028) for the girl on fire ficathon, with the following note:
> 
> "It's been about a year since I read the book, but I suddenly had a lot of feelings and had to write this, so I hope I remember it."

She spends the first days in bed, waking up shaking in the mornings and the evenings and the midnights. She's catatonic and restless in turns, and Peeta wants--tries--to brush the hair and tears out of her eyes with paint-stained fingers, but his place is next door and far away. She doesn't want to be repaid for what she's done for him.

For the first time in her life, Katniss is not hungry. He watches her try to reclaim the days when she starved until the smell of baking bread starts to wake her instead of her own voice. She tastes the bread like she can't remember it, and her face finds its place on his chest. She still doesn't cry, but she breathes.

\--

Nothing is easier said than done anymore, because they still don't know how to speak, but she watches him gain confidence in reality, harsh as it is, and he watches her learn, again, how to let someone hold her. It's slow, finding themselves and each other again, but it happens.

\--

She kisses him the same day he first sees her cry, when she's staring at the television without watching it, glaring at it without turning it on. He raps his knuckles on the doorway, his look sarcastic. Boundaries shouldn't exist anymore, even if there are still ones they can't cross.

Looking up at him with his forced half-smile, she breaks, and he strokes the hair that's fallen under her braid and lets her cry into her own hands. It feels surreal, everything that's happened, everything that's happening, and it hurts. But Peeta's voice is soft and his hand is gentle, and she turns around to kiss him because Katniss has found beauty in darkness before. She can do it again.

\--

They cling to each other after that. She watches him bake; he watches her watch him. Katniss pulls him into her room at night. Sometimes, it feels a little like living in a cave a lifetime ago, alone and holding each other, but Katniss learns that she wouldn't trade. She wouldn't go back to that, to Peeta fading and child killers, painful as it is to remember that Prim was safe then. The possibilities of this new world are too many, her need for Peeta too great. She wouldn't trade.

That's when she says goodbye and starts treating the world like somewhere to live.


End file.
